WHY WE NEED THE FIG WASP
The demise of a single species can produce a cascade of extinctions and threaten an entire ecosystem |
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BY ANDREW DOBSON
At 5:30 in the morning we are deep in a dark forest on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal. We've been out walking for only 15 minutes, but I'm already soaked in sweat.
As a colleague and I plod along, my head lamp picks out the occasional trail marker, but mainly the light seems to operate as a major local landmark for insects. Several mosquitoes have already discovered the delights of the soft parts of my ears, while others are slowly working their way between my socks and legs to be discovered later after much scratching. Suddenly a deranged roaring and barking starts 25 m above my head and builds chaotically in intensity before slowly quieting after several minutes. Similar mad choruses respond from other areas of the forest. Hearing the dawn cacophony of howler monkeys always gives me a deep sense of pleasure--the joy of being back in the tropics. It may be a hot, humid place where insects, plants and fungi rule, but the phone and fax won't find me here. I'm free to watch monkeys, collect data and try to tease out a tiny piece of the great puzzle of life's diversity.
That diversity faces disaster, and every biologist has a horror story to tell. Each year many of us return to the field after a cold winter's teaching to discover that our research sites have been destroyed and our experiments and study organisms have disappeared. We can see with our own eyes the mass extermination of the world's animal and plant life as forests, savannas and wetlands give way to farmland, housing developments and shopping malls. If current rates of habitat destruction continue, it is likely that we will condemn from a quarter to half the world's currently living species to extinction within the next 100 years.
Nowhere is life more diverse than in tropical rain forests, and nowhere is the assault on life more tragic. Scientists are only beginning to understand the complex webs of interdependencies among various species. Increasingly, ecological research in the tropics is revealing how dependent humans are on forests for a wide variety of important services, particularly regulation of the earth's atmosphere and climate. We may owe as much to the residents of the rain forests as we do to our cattle, corn and wheat.
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